24 dic 1971 anni - Janice Marie Hannigan DISAPPEARANCE

Descrizione:

Janice Hannigan was born on March 23, 1955 in Toppenish, Yakima County, WA to parents Martin James Hannigan Sr and Sally (Heemsah or George) Hannigan. She is an enrolled member of the Yakama Nation and lived on the roughly 2,186 square mile (approximately 1.4 million acre) Yakama Indian Reservation.

Janice was the oldest of seven siblings. Her second youngest sibling, sister Trudi Lee-Clark, was born on August 6, 1963 in Toppenish.

Janice's family was apparently well-known in their community. Her mother Sally would put on public dances; according to Trudi, she did this, "to get the teenagers off the streets."

Janice's parents separated at some point before her disappearance; she went to go live with her father in Harrah, while her six younger siblings lived with their mother in Buena. Both communities are part of Yakima County, though Buena is not within the reservation. Janice saw her younger siblings less after their parents' separation.

According to a Bureau of Indian Affairs missing persons report from 1975, in February 1971, Janice went missing from a basketball game that she went to with her father in Lewiston, Nez Perce County, Idaho. It seems that Janice was then eventually found or returned by herself; further information about this incident is not publicly available.

Some sources, including a flyer made by the Yakama Nation Police Department, state that Janice, 15, disappeared on March 1, 1972 from Wapato, Yakima County, WA. However, this is not accurate: that date is from a time Janice couldn't be located, but was later found. According to her sister Trudi, the Yakama Agency lists Janice as deceased that same day.

By the fall of 1972, 16-year-old Janice was a sophomore at White Swan High School in White Swan, WA. Her sophomore year was going well. She was especially excited because it was football season, one of her favorite sports.

In early November 1971, Janice was a candidate for queen of the Intertribal Veterans Day Ceremonial in Toppenish alongside other teenage girls. According to an article about the candidates, which featured a photo of Janice in traditional regalia, "Her favorite activities include cooking, bead work, and football." While Janice did not end up becoming queen, this did not seem to significantly dampen her spirits.

On Tuesday, December 21, 1971, Janice was admitted to the hospital with "multiple contusions" — bruises — "around the head" with swelling; another source indicates that there were bruises on both her head and chest.

In his discharge summary, which doesn't identify the hospital or say anything about the cause of Janice's injuries, Dr. H. D. Buckley wrote, "The patient [...] has shown no evidence of any headache or loss in the level of consciousness. The contused areas show the swelling to be receding."

Janice was discharged from the hospital on Christmas Eve 1971, which was a Friday. She has never been seen or heard from again.

While the discharge summary may not identify the hospital, I have found evidence of a Dr. Harold Douglas Buckley working at the Wapato Medical Center. Born to Scottish parents in China in 1928, Dr Buckley and his family immigrated to and settled in Seattle, WA and became naturalized citizens in the 1940s. He was a Korean War vet, and by 1958, while still in the Navy, he became a medical doctor. He passed away in 1979 in a hospital in Spokane, WA at the age of 50.

Dr Buckley worked at the Wapato Medical Center from at least 1968 to 1972, as that is all I could find evidence of. WMC was located at 620 West First Street in Wapato, Yakima County, WA.

According to NamUs, "Janice was upset about the breakup of her parents. She is a possible runaway." However, this seems to apply to her previous March 1971 disappearance, as that is the date provided by that site. She had no transportation of her own. Her family does not believe she ran away.

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Over the years Janice's mother Sally asked many people about what might have happened. According to Janice's sister Trudi, their mother, "didn't know what happened, where [Janice] was, who she was last with. She interrogated a couple of her boyfriends she had; they would just tell her they didn't know where she was." At one point, Sally told investigators that she heard a rumor that Janice was staying with a woman with the last name George in the Seattle area.

In a 2018 interview, Trudi said, "Janice came to my mom’s mind a lot through the years. She would get her hopes up when people would tell her, ‘Oh, I saw Janice walking in Seattle. She’s living with some woman over there’ or ‘I saw Janice walking from Wapato, think she was going home to Harrah.’ All lies."

Janice's parents never got closure. Martin passed away in 1989, and Sally died in 2001.

Since their mother's passing, Trudi had taken up the search for Janice, and by 2014 intensified her investigation. Trudi was eight years old when her older sister went missing. She carried a folder filled with all the documents she could find on Janice with her and did multiple interviews with the press over the years.

According to Trudi, at one point investigators told her that they think her father, Martin Hannigan, did something related to Janice's disappearance. Trudi was adamant that he had nothing to do with it.

Despite this, Trudi understood that her sister was most likely a victim of foul play at the hands of an unknown person. She "believe[d] Janice might be buried on land near the family home outside Harrah, on land she and her siblings lease to a local farmer. 'At the old home site we had a burn area and an outside toilet. That was way back there on the property, along with a well.'" The family also had a cellar under the house. The outhouse was "closer to the downhill."

Trudi made several attempts to get help from the farmer that leases the land, as well as have authorities bring cadaver dogs to the area. In October 2017 she wrote to the farmer, asking him to dig a little deeper "if he wouldn't mind": "I don’t know how far down you dig when you’re planting, but I do know that where the pumpkins are planted on top of the hill is where our home was."

Just like her parents, however, Trudi's questions were never answered. She passed away at the age of 55 on December 23, 2018, 47 years nearly to the day after Janice went missing. Since then, Trudi's daughter Tashina Thomas has taken up the search for Janice, and has created the Facebook community "Let's Find Janice Hannigan and Bring Her Home."

Trudi is buried in Toppenish Creek Cemetery near White Swan. In an interview only two months before her death, she had said that if Janice's body is ever found, she would like her to be buried in that same cemetery, next to their father.

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Janice's disappearance is the second oldest unsolved case in general on the Yakama Reservation, and the oldest active missing Indigenous persons case in Washington state as a whole.

At the time of her disappearance Janice was 16 years old, 5'0, and 105 lbs. She had black hair, brown eyes, and a mole on her chin. Her ears may be pierced. If alive today she would be 70 years old.

Janice's dental records are available for comparison, though it is unknown if her fingerprints are. Her younger sister Trudi submitted her DNA to LE in April 2017.

There are six UID exclusions on Janice's NamUs profile: Swamp Mountain Jane Doe 1976, Fly Creek Jane Doe 1980 (who has since been identified as Sandy Morden), and four UIDs found in Virginia.

Janice is classified as Endangered Missing on both the Doe Network and the Charley Project. Anyone with information in her case is urged to please contact the Yakima County Sheriff's Office at (509) 574-2500. The agency case number is 17C00300.

It should be noted that, according to the Yakima Herald-Republic, "Though State Patrol says this is a Yakima County Sheriff's Office case, it has been returned to the Yakama Nation Police Department." However, the agency listed as a contact on all sources remains the Yakima County Sheriff's Office.

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WRITE-UP COMPLETION DATE: June 3, 2025

Cases mentioned above that are also/will be present on this timeline:
Swamp Mountain Jane Doe and Sandy Morden
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MARCH 1 1971
DAY OF WEEK: Monday

DECEMBER 24 1971
DAY OF WEEK: Friday
EVENTS: Christmas Eve

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